Science fiction has always been a genre that engages with moral and political issues. It uses aliens and other worlds to show us our problems through different eyes. Doctor Who was inspired by the foundational works of HG Wells, whose The War of the Worlds is one of the classics of anti-colonial literature. The Doctor is generally protrayed as an anti-authoritarian figure, and his greatest enemies, the Daleks, are Nazis. The best stories of the 21st Century are typically the ones with the strongest moral themes, such as Oxygen, in which the villain is a corporation that puts profit above human life. The BBC's mission is to Inform, Educate and Entertain, and there's no good reason why Doctor Who shouldn't do all three.
However, to do so successfully, the show needs a consistent moral framework. During Steven Moffat's time as showrunner, the Doctor would often say that he was "Never cruel and never cowardly". However, The Interstellar Song Context, which trys to cover the same themes as Oxygen undermines its message with a scene in which the Doctor tortures a character in cold blood. In fact, RTD's writing in his last season seems to have developed a nasty streak of cruelty. We had a scene in which the Doctor cuts off the power to a hospital, one in which robots vapourise a cat, and one in which the villain is reduced to an egg and a sperm and then hoovered up by a floor-cleaning robot, all played for laughs, in the space of a single episode.
Part of the problem is that RTD's moral thinking has become shallow and simplistic. The frantic pace of his episodes rarely allows for any message deeper than "This stuff's bad, OK?" which comes off as patronising at best. Also, he seems to think that morality consists entirely of cheering for the right people. One problem with that is that you're deciding who's good and who's bad based on who they are, not what they do. Another is that people who don't count as the right people end up being villfied. Any what do people do when the feel villfied? They push back. If you portray all straight white men as evil losers, as RTD did in his last season, a certain proportion of them will think, "Stuff you, I'm voting for the Daleks!"
Moral messages should be offered to the audience to be taken freely, not forced upon them. Showrunners doing deliberately contentious things and saying, "If you disagree with me, you're a bad person!" achieves nothing but raising hackles and dividing the crowd.
Moral messages also need to form a natural part of the story. If you have to finish with the Doctor preaching a trite little sermon, as many 13th Doctor stories did, you've failed. In Genesis of the Daleks, the Doctor's dilemma about how far he can go to thwart the rise of the greatest evil power in the Universe without becoming like them himself is the very heart of the story. One of the key themes of the Third Doctor's era is the conflict between the Doctor's anti-authoritarian values and the Brigadier's military mindset, and how they manage to work together for a common purpose and even be good friends despite this. Inform, educate and entertain, but remember that in Doctor Who, you have to entertain first, and let informing and educating come along for the ride.
The last two showrunners have both attempted to make points with the identity of the Doctor. This doesn't really work. We have a lot of baggage about certain things because of our history, but the Doctor is an alien and shouldn't have those issues to start with. In Star Trek, which was first broadcast while the Civil Rights Movement was ongoing, it was important to show a black woman Lt. Uhura, as a senior officer on a star ship. However, the Doctor doesn't belong to that type of command structure, and he comes from a planet where the Atlantic slave trade and segregation never happened. He should be able to treat our baggage about skin colour as a load of pathetic nonsense. In The Story and The Engine, the Doctor goes to Nigeria because he says he feels at home there as a black man. But Ncuti Gatwa had always played his version of the Doctor as queer, and Nigeria is a shockingly homophobic country. I felt that the episode should have been called The Elephant in the Room.
Injustice always has a historical context. I found it depressing that the villain in Rosa, who was trying to thwart the Civil Rights Movement, came from 50000 years in the future. Go that far in the other direction and living in caves was an exciting new innovation. Why would the lies that slave traders told to excuse their crimes still be believed that far in the future? The unintended message seems to be that people never improve. There's not much point trying to tell people to be better if you're going to imply that they can't.
A show with time travel could use that to explore the historic roots of injustice. Suppose we have a story where one guest character seems suspicious of another for no apparent reason. A companion asks why, and he replies, "You can't trust people from Kalthur, everyone knows that." Later, the character from Kalthur does something heroic, and we see that the other's prejuduce against him was unjustified.
In a later story, we visit Kalthur in the distant past, and witness the terrible events that led to the city getting its evil reputation - long forgotten by the time of the original story.
If I have one piece of advice for the writers of future Doctor Who stories on how to handle moral issues, it's don't tell people what to think, just make them think.
